This game has food, production, "dust" (basically technology that's generated) and happiness.

First time I played, I expanded way too fast, and didn't fill out my systems, so I ran into a huge penalty on all my planets to my happiness, and had not developed my tehcnology to have any improvements to culture/happiness.

My production ground to a halt and all my planets went on strike.

So....this game is a balancing act. Expand fast, but make sure you keep the money/happiness production up, or you might dig yourself into a hole.

Yes, you have to THINK to play this game. As I believe all games should do in some form

I meant graphics as in a user interface. the review just shows it in a very menu based look and it didn't look like you're immersed at all. That's the reason I was asking.

The chess/balancing game caters to my interest, but I don't want to be looking at menus 100% of the time.

Well, really there are several areas...

Planetary screen, where you can see the system, or zoom to a planet. You can zoom in & out of the galaxy as well to see the wormholes and links between planets. No tables there, just when you zoom in to fleet & planet data. Other screens like the tech tree aren't really tables.

Seriously, if you liked Moo2, you'd probably like this game...even with it's few flaws.

For me, a flaw would be that if you research the tech tree entirely, there is no advancement past that. In Moo2, you could still research "future tech", which would add a bonus and add to miniaturization of componenets in ships.